Jackson police officers receive salary increase, recruitment and retention incentives
To increase recruitment and retention among Jackson police officers, the city council unanimously approved a salary and benefits increase for the department totaling $304,826.
In order to expedite how soon officers will receive their pay increase, and to avoid postponing it until October, a special-called city council meeting was held on Friday morning following Tuesday's regularly scheduled meeting.
Jackson Police Chief Thom Corley explained that neighboring jurisdictions are offering their officers a competitive starting salary of $53,000 per year, while JPD currently offers $46,000.
The proposed budget amendment would raise the starting JPD salary approximately $50,000.
"It's a dilemma that we've been in for a little bit and we're playing catch up," he said in reference to attaining a competitive compensation.
He spoke before the council on Tuesday during the first reading of the proposed salary increase about the need to incentivize officers as they deal with a 50% higher call volume than surrounding counties.
“There is an expectation for us to be the size of the agency we are, with the call volume that we have, with the service population that we have,” Corley said. “We have to provide those tools, the technology, and the salaries to make that worth the appeal for someone who wants to come work here.”
During the meeting, council member Frank McMeen (District 5) asked Chief Corley what it would take to get officers from surrounding counties to instead come and work for JPD. Again, Corley boiled it down to the need for higher salary.
“The smaller jurisdictions around us have caught back up close to, or at our salary right now,” he said. “So to recruit and to get some to come to Jackson, we’re going to have to have a better.”
Mayor Scott Conger spoke to the concerted effort being made to support officers at the end of their tenure, but also in encouraging them to join JPD.
“We’ve done some back end things to encourage our officers to stay with us when it comes to retirement incentives, their buy-back of their time, and things like that so at the back end of their career they can get more of an end-of career bonus, if you will,” he said. “So we want to do things on the front end as well to get the officers into the organization we can keep them.”
Corley added that the state’s retirement systems have allowed senior officers to take advantage of an earlier retirement, leaving gaps for the department to fill and the inherent need for increased salaries to bring new officers on.
“More officers on the street means more availability and not burning officers out that we have here and then it just allows them to be more effective at what they do,” Conger said.
This article originally appeared on Jackson Sun: Jackson police officers get salary increase after council approval
